Nuclear threats once again seem to be in vogue. North Korean leader Kim Jong Un is threatening to test a ICBM that would allow him to send atomic weapons to the U.S. mainland. Just before Christmas, U.S. president-elect Donald Trump seemed to be calling for a renewed nuclear arms race with Russia.

And just after Christmas, a fake news story prompted Pakistan’s defence minister to take to Twitter to

But we’re still far from the hair-trigger madness of the Cold War, when the slightest misstep threatened to ignite nuclear armageddon between NATO and the Soviet Union.

Canada’s bunkers have been decommissioned, the civil defence corps disbanded and the sirens disconnected. Below, a gallery of rarely seen artifacts from when Canada stood ready to endure armageddon at a moment’s notice. Most items have been provided courtesy of the Edmonton-based Canadian Civil Defence Museum Association.

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Library and Archives Canada

War was not an abstract concept for the men and women who prepared Canada for nuclear conflict. The country’s civil and military administration was packed with Second World War veterans who knew full well what a ruined city looked like.

So there’s an uncomfortable accuracy to these illustrations, prepared by the Canadian Emergency Measures Organization, showing Ottawa turned into a ruin. Planning for nuclear war usually assumed that Canada would largely be hit by collateral damage; bombers getting lost or crashing on their way to nuke the United States.

But Ottawa was an exception: Planners figured the Soviets would probably spare at least one bomber to wipe out the Canadian capital.

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Never before broadcast or published, this is the Canadian Emergency Broadcast that was set to play on Edmonton airwaves in the event of nuclear war. The audio, stored on reel-to-reel tapes, was found in a decommissioned Edmonton municipal bunker by the Canadian Civil Defence Museum Association, who then digitized the audio.

The second this tape hit the airwaves, the result would have been “chaos,” says Fred Armbruster, executive director of the Canadian Civil Defence Museum Association. Edmonton — as a military and oil center — was more prepared than most for nuclear war. But there still would have been thousands of people whose first real grappling with the consequences of atomic war was when they heard this recording — and suddenly had mere minutes to figure out what to do.

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Courtesy of the Canadian Civil Defence Museum Association

In New York City, many buildings are still adorned with a black and yellow “fallout shelter” sign indicating where civilians could flee in the event of nuclear attack. But Canada had a much more “do it yourself” approach to nuclear war. Government bunkers were built across the country to ensure “continuity of government” by sheltering top officials like the provincial premier and the local fire chief. Aside from that, everybody else was on their own.

This diagram comes from the 1962 pamphlet Simpler Shelters by Canada’s Emergency Measures Organization. By the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, it was clear that Canadians weren’t going to be following the U.S. model of fitting their homes with elaborate fully-stocked concrete fallout shelters. So Ottawa designed this as a kind of compromise: A small basement fort made out of sand bags and concrete blocks.

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Calgary Herald file photo

Before the advent of intercontinental ballistic missiles, nuclear war was supposed to come to Canada in the form of Russian bomber fleets. Hundreds of Russian Tu-95s (a strategic bomber that resembles the B-52) would fly over the pole and drone over Canada on their way to annihilating the United States. For anybody without a shelter, this gave them three hours to evacuate suspected “target” cities.

This is a photo of Operation Lifesaver, a test evacuation of Calgary in September, 1955. Depending on where they lived, Calgarians were supplied with maps showing the “drainage” areas where they should evacuate. Ideally, the system would have worked similar to the evacuations during the 2016 Fort McMurray fires; citizens would flee to neighbouring towns and village where they would be met with a cot and a hot meal. But evacuees also risked being snarled in traffic.

And being stuck in a car on a prairie highway is pretty much the worst place to be when an airburst hydrogen bomb detonates overhead. It’s why Armbruster said that if he suddenly found himself in Downtown Edmonton during the onset of a Cold War nuclear attack, he would avoid evacuation and simply head to the basement of the nearest parkade.

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Courtesy of the Canadia n Civil Defence Museum Association

Government messaging in the early days of the Cold War followed a pretty simple line: “Nuclear war is coming, and you might survive.” But according to Andrew Burtch, a civil defence historian at the Canadian War Museum, by the 1960s the tone had shifted to one of “what if you don’t die? What would you do then?”

That’s the philosophy by which Canada got this poster; a dopey-looking woman running away from a nuclear attack that she forgot to prepare for. It seems strange that Canada needed to shame its citizens into trying to save themselves from nuclear holocaust, but officials were up against a pretty strong sense of apathy from the citizenry. “There was a fair amount of fatalism; ‘well if it happens I’m dead,’” said Burtch.

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File

For those who came of age during the 1950s and 1960s, “duck and cover” drills are the most vivid reminders of the Cold War. It’s also one of the most ridiculed practices of civil defence; if thermonuclear devices were really going to rain down on North American cities, what good would it do to hide under a plywood desk?

Quite a bit, actually. Although a hydrogen blast would annihilate anything in its immediate vicinity, anybody more than eight kilometres away could escape virtually unscathed if they simply shielded themselves from the bomb’s initial “flash.” Canada, unlike the United States, actually had experience with one of its cities being partially levelled by a massive explosion.

And Canadian officials knew that the 1917 Halifax Explosion saw many people blinded simply because they had been standing near windows at the moment of detonation. If they had ducked and covered, they would have been fine.

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Courtesy of the Canadian Civil Defence Museum Association

This is an illustration from the 1961 pamphlet Fallout on the Farm, published by the Canadian Department of Agriculture. It depicts how rural Canada would have seen the immediate aftermath of a nuclear attack.

A city just over the horizon is in ruins, and a cloud of radioactive fallout is raining down on the landscape. Even though farmers were likely to dodge the effects of the blast they would be forced to cope with radioactive crops and livestock.

“The flesh of animals with radiation sickness will be edible if they are killed before they become very sick,” it reads but advises farmers to do their best to keep animals alive to feed the survivors of a nuclear war.

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Tom Braid/Edmonton Sun

This is a modern photograph of the airlock entrance to the Edmonton civil defence bunker, which is still located roughly five kilometres east of West Edmonton Mall. While Alberta’s provincial officials would be rushed to a bunker two hours’ south at CFB Penhold, this was where the City of Edmonton would shelter a skeleton crew tasked with managing whatever was left standing once the attack was over.

It housed six full-time staff during the Cold War and was designed to hold 36 people for up to 14 days in the event of a nuclear emergency. The existence of this bunker — as with many others like it across Canada — was kept as quiet as possible.

These facilities were akin to a lifeboat on the Titanic; things could get ugly if panicked crowds suddenly swarmed the area looking for a spot inside.

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Courtesy of Canadian Civil Defence Museum Association

For a city like Vancouver, there are a lot of parallels between Cold War-era civil defence and modern-day earthquake preparedness. Both prompted city hall to stockpile caches of food and emergency equipments.

Both saw the formation of volunteer corps to deal with the aftermath. And in both cases, the central message to citizens was that they could expect to be on their own for days after the initial event. But the main difference between civil defence and disaster preparedness, according to Armbruster, is just how hard the message of nuclear risk was hammered home to Canadians: News broadcasts, posters, school lessons and terse information pamphlets mailed to every home.

“Today, we don’t talk about anything like that,” he said. This sternly-worded pamphlet, mailed to Vancouverites in 1957, informs them they live in a “target area” and will not survive a nuclear attack if they don’t get it together.

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Compiled by Andrew Burtch, this Google Map depicts the former locations of nuclear warning sirens in Edmonton. Nowadays, all of Canada’s Cold War sirens have been dismantled or disconnected, aside from a select few that have been conscripted to serve as community sirens to summon volunteer firefighters or wake up sleepy teenagers.

While Ottawa, Toronto, Vancouver and Edmonton were relatively well-rigged with sirens, much of Canada would miss the sound of a nuclear siren — particularly if there was a strong wind. In many rural areas, it’s conceivable that if people didn’t hear the bombers or see the mushroom clouds, their first indication that something was amiss was when they switched on their radio after dinner and heard nothing but emergency broadcasts.

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James Park

There are few greater illustrations of the idiom “best case scenario” than this image. This is the prime minister’s office inside the “Diefenbunker”; the 100,000 square foot underground facility in Carp, Ont. designed to house critical elements of the federal government in the event of nuclear war.

This small, drab room was where the prime minister of Canada was supposed to wait out the fallout cloud while trying to figure out how to rebuild a country that may have seen whole urban areas turned into radioactive ash. That ash, by the way, likely would have contained his family: Loved ones were not allowed inside the bunker.

Instead, the office was never used, the Cold War ended and, as this 2016 image shows, the Diefenbunker Cold War Museum now hosts an annual easter egg hunt.

When my assistant said there was a call from the White House, I picked up, said 'Hello' and started to ask if this was a prank

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